Why women aren’t funny: yet another take

Christopher Hitchens has taken a stab at this question in the past — I use the word “stab” with malice aforethought, but I can’t say he’s brought the horse into the barn, argument-wise. I like the phrase “humor gap”, though — it evokes both missiles and open legs in such a compact space.

Here is Mr. Hitchens, who I cannot believe has ever gotten laid in his life, but I must be mistaken:

Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.

I dunno. I speak as a member of the apparently tiny tribe of women who are quasi-funny, or at least think they are. It actually doesn’t seem like such a tiny tribe to me, but maybe if I lived at the Beijing Zoo I’d think the world was crawling with giant pandas, too. Almost every woman I know is pretty funny, but maybe I hang out with the wrong crowd.

My best guess about women and funniness is: Women aren’t “funny” because men don’t think they are, or aren’t willing to pay them to be funny. I mean, it’s sort of like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, right, where if you’re a Doctor of Thinkology everybody suddenly “knows” you’re smart?

Out of 133 authors of features under the Shouts and Murmurs banner (in the modern, post-1992 era) 17 have been women. (1)

That’s 12.782%.

What I can’t represent here is how funny his own piece is, or the intentionally hilarious bar charts that accompany it.

I will say this, however: David Remnick, right your wrongs. I volunteer to write for Shouts & Murmurs. Dare me to be funny. (Dare me, anyway, to be at least as funny as some of the lamest stuff you’ve published, if not quite so funny as, say, Simon Rich, who should be serving in Iraq, or Ian Frasier.)

The New York Times ran this story over the weekend about the popularity of “life lists,” those 1,001 Things to Do Before You Die lists that, frankly, just depress the hell out of me.

An excerpt of the article, which appears to have been written by a guy but is, nevertheless, funny:

And no wonder life lists are so ubiquitous. They are, proponents say, the perfect way for anxious time-crunched professionals to embark on spiritual quests in a productivity-obsessed age. The lists are results-oriented, quantifiable and relentlessly upbeat. If Aristotle were alive, he might envy the efficiency of a master list in which the messy search for meaning in life is boiled down to a simple grocery list: “get a tattoo,” “learn to surf.”

On my life list, which I try never, ever to think about, because “feed the fish” and “go to six meetings in one day” aren’t on it, despite being about 80 percent of my life, is “write for The New Yorker“. I figure playing the gender card may be my only shot.

so that’s only 12% of the New Yorker’s POV. what about the other countless papers that may have a similiar section in their papers? or what about the numerous books, articles, booklets, etc producing the funniest women without a major, highly visible frontman to capture interest?

I KNOW you are funny! One of my favorite panelists on NPR’s “Wait, wait…” Maybe Mr. Hitchens heard you and was intimidated by your quick wit and dead-on assessment of certain people and events in the nation’s capital?

Wimmen are too busy with their hair and makeup to be funny. They just laugh at our comments to build the male ego – while being sexy (not beautiful, but sexy) Most wimmen can be sexy when they want to.